Quality In, Quality Out: Data Preparation for Campaign Success

Telecommunications companies have vast amounts of customer and network data spanning across the enterprise. In order to achieve favorable campaign results, marketers need to make it as clean, complete and accurate as possible. This is especially true when engaging customers with highly-targeted offers across multiple channels and devices.

In our upcoming webcast entitled “Quality In, Quality Out: Data Preparation for Campaign Success ”, we will discuss why data aggregation and cleansing is especially important for Telco and the latest trends for getting the "quality in, quality out" you need to fuel more effective modeling and analysis. Accurate customer insight can drive relevant and highly-targeted offers that customers will act on, reduce customer churn and increase customer loyalty.

When the CMO Council recently asked more than 200 senior marketing decision makers how effectively they have aligned physical and digital experiences, half admitted that these integrated experiences were selective, at best. Yet it is alignment, consistency and connection that drive the foundational relationship between the brand and the buyer.

The CMO Council, in partnership with IBM, will host a one-hour interactive webcast with industry-leading media, entertainment and telecommunications marketers to discuss how audience insights across the digital and physical experience have been turned into action, allowing these brands to personalize and enrich each engagement.

Multiple case studies will also be discussed during the webcast that focus on the power of segmentation and innovations around cognitive computing. Speakers include Liz Miller, SVP of Marketing for the CMO Council; Jody Sarno, Dedicated Client Partner, Communications Industry for IBM; Chris Crayner, Chief Digital Officer for NBC Universal Parks and Resorts; and Gayle Bock, Director of Customer Engagement for T-Mobile.

There is little doubt that marketers have embraced the need for a connected and cohesive customer experience. But while the new customer experience, especially the digital experience, has changed the way most organizations reach and engage with their customers, not all marketers are overjoyed with their current results. In a recent study conducted by the CMO Council and IBM, 38 percent of senior marketers admitted that the new engagement strategies in place have yielded mixed results, with some campaigns yielding expected results while others have not hit the mark.

Similar to results being spotty at best, marketers also admit that their goals for delivering a truly connected customer experience have also fallen short as only 6 percent say they have completely connected physical and digital experiences with all touchpoints, connecting and informing the next relevant and valued journey for the customer. In fact 42 percent of respondents indicated that their primary goal for the year ahead was to better connect and integrate loosely tied campaigns into a stronger, more cohesive experience that can actually drive engagement across the customer’s lifecycle with their brand.

So with that goal in mind, what needs to actually happen to deliver real customer experience success in 2017?

Architecting today’s customer journey is a top priority for senior marketing leaders, who must guide the customer through the path to purchase and craft experiences across a multitude of channels and devices, all while keeping sight of the ultimate goal: guiding a customer through to conversion. But there is a channel that often goes unrecognized and unsupported in this new digital age: the phone call.

According to a recent BIA/Kelsey report, “call commerce” is a $1 trillion influence engine as analysts estimate that click to call influences some $1 trillion in U.S. consumer spending. The firm went on to project that some “169 billion mobile calls to businesses (will be made) by 2020, driven by smartphone penetration, high commercial intent and the natural handoff between mobile engagement and phone calls.”

The digital experience has brought rise to an influential channel of profit in the phone call that must not be overlooked. As customer satisfaction is measured in quick clicks and frictionless engagements, tools like the Google call button have made it even easier for brands to actively connect digital experiences to profitable inbound calls. This call commerce demands a new set of strategies, campaigns and executions, in addition to new measures and metrics to better track these online to offline conversations.

Year over year, new strategies and plans are developed in an effort to boost the bottom line, ramp up customer engagement and establish profitable competitive advantages that elevate strategies to proven industry best practices. But in reality, even the best-laid plans get sidetracked. They are adopted only in part, stalled by organizational silos or tabled because of budget concerns. When implemented, results can be less than hoped for or forecasted—customers react differently…or not at all.

As we head into the second half of the year, the CMO Council, in partnership with Vindicia, will host a one-hour, interactive webcast to discuss the new opportunities in business models, digital engagements and experiences, including subscription services and recurring payments. We will also be discussing how leading brands, led by fearless marketers, have pushed through issues of complex processes and customer journeys rife with gates, stops and requirements and instead taken the path that feels counter-intuitive yet delivers a frictionless experience for the customer.

Among the questions and topics to be discussed in this hour are:

•Where and how are we unintentionally stopping our customers from engaging, transacting and lengthening their lifetime relationships with our brands?
•What are industry disruptors doing to change the experience and make waves, and how can we apply that same thinking to our businesses today?
•Are we so focused on creating processes and experiences that we are actually making it harder for customers to be loyal?
•New ideas and thinking around monetizing experiences and turning content into opportunity

Winning hearts and minds is a continuing challenge for marketers seeking to connect with consumers on an emotional, cultural or behavioral level. Whether you run marketing for a distinguished, dynamic or developing brand, there is always a need to continually search for ways to stay relevant, real and rewarding for customers.

Drawing on best practices and perspectives from the CMO Council’s latest report, titled “Building Brands That Attract and Engage Fans,” this upcoming webinar will feature both brand leaders and domain experts.

Topics to be explored include:

-The roots of brand attraction and cognitive connection
-How to survive and prosper amid market diversity and change
-The intersection of cultural and behavioral economics
-The essential ingredients for authenticity and credibility
-Fresh thinking on new ways to invigorate and magnetize brands

Webinar participants will include Liz Miller, SVP Marketing from CMO Council, Jennifer Grabenstetter, Executive Director of Global Communications- Product Care at Sealed Air and author John McGarr, President of Fresh Squeezed Ideas.

In today’s expanding marketing landscape—not to mention today’s increasingly complex matrix known as the customer journey—the chief marketing officer is faced with sheer and unadulterated chaos. From the multiplying channels that our customers are defining as their most valued to the massive amounts of customer data and intelligence flooding (i.e., clogging) our analytics and intelligence systems, CMOs must wrangle and tame the complexity in order to make better decisions faster and have true visibility and transparency into performance, outcomes and value to the business.

Unfortunately, the old standards of marketing operations no longer apply, and new approaches, alignments and agility must be included. To delve into the issues of chaos, operations and the mandates to make bold business decisions, the CMO Council, in partnership with Aprimo, will host a one-hour interactive webcast to discuss the complexities and opportunities of modern marketing management. Among the topics to be discussed are:

•How to deliver marketing results at scale with total accountability and transparency in operations
•Best practices to create order from chaos, bringing actionable insights from marketing programs to enhance results and prove ROI

Joining the CMO Council for this best-practice dialogue will be brand leaders who are transforming the chaos across the organization, as well as marketing operations experts who will share examples of where and how transformation can help tame the chaos and turn it into a profitable process.

In today’s omnichannel world, consumers engaging with digital marketing convert in four ways: online via a website or mobile app, in person, and via a phone call. This last conversion—the phone call—can be the source of one of the most costly mistakes made by marketing teams: not understanding how digital channels, campaigns, ads and website content drive customer calls.

Smartphones have fundamentally changed the way consumers engage with businesses online. Instead of filling out web forms, consumers are picking up the phone to call. According to recent CMO Council research, 45 percent of marketers agree that while their customers primarily research purchases online, they still want to call at different moments throughout the customer journey.

So why are call conversions often left out of digital performance metrics? Are we missing the opportunity to connect our customers’ digital journey to the phone calls they want to make? What data does the organization need to capture in order to allocate budget to the digital channels, ads and web content that drive customers to the most successful outcomes?

To discuss these issues and more, the CMO Council, in partnership with DialogTech, will host a one-hour, interactive webcast focused on the new measures, metrics and fundamental connections required to fully optimize the customer journey. The webcast will include real-world case studies and examples of how savvy digital marketing leaders are connecting online and mobile experiences directly to calls and conversions that drive the bottom line.

How do consumer brands stay relevant, authentic and differentiated in a rapidly evolving and culturally complex global market? With 195 countries and 6,500 languages around the world, the challenge is daunting as brands seek new methods and motivators to connect and engage with audiences in social media, experiential and advertising channels.

John McGarr, author of Reincarnation and President of Fresh Squeezed Ideas, suggests that the most successful brands today have learned that building these
strong bonds with current and future consumers requires:

• Developing a deep understanding of those they want to connect with
• Having a clear brand purpose
• Creating a brand engagement model that is based on attraction

So where do brands need to start in order to begin reaching a better understanding of their customers? And how could deeper understanding impact how and where brands engage?

To explore how marketers can create and optimize contextual, authentic engagements with consumers, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council will be hosting a live webinar, in partnership with Fresh Squeezed Ideas. During this interactive, hour-long session, we will be delving into the key questions that marketers need to be asking as they strive to better connect with and engage audiences across a multitude of channels.

Some of the topics to be explored during the live webinar include:

• How marketers are managing the cultural context of their brands
• The cultural forces that influence brand perception
• How marketers are tracking brand resonance and relevance
• What is missing from what brands know about their customers

The shift to digital experience has forever changed the marketing landscape, heightening the need for new expertise, new campaigns, new content and new data-rich repositories for marketers to gain intelligence and insight about their customers. According to a new study from the CMO Council in partnership with IBM, this new business environment has altered content strategies, demanding new forms and formats of engagement, has made the customer journey more complex as brands must manage how and where customers are actively choosing to engage, and has turned customer engagement into a real-time, 24/7 opportunity.

However, according to 43 percent of senior marketing respondents, this new era of digital transformation has also revealed cracks in the very systems and processes across the organization…cracks and gaps that make it more difficult than ever to centralize and aggregate data and intelligence across the entire organization.

These gaps are doing more than challenging how brands are engaging today—they are putting the future at risk as far too many marketers feel they have yet to master “simple” marketing analytics, making them feel as if gaining business traction through new technologies like cognitive computing is a far off dream. But excitement for these innovations is growing. More than one in four marketers said that they are excited about the possibilities that advancements like cognitive computing hold for the future. So the real challenge will be readying organizations for a future that is here today.

Join the CMO Council and experts from IBM as we delve into the findings of this most recent study and share thoughts and perspectives on how these new shifts and challenges are fundamentally changing where and how marketers must address the holistic customer experience. The interactive roundtable will invite questions and commentary for the live webcast audience, along with active debate and discussion among the expert panel for the webcast.

According to a CMO Council study, “Closing the Gap: Understanding the Sales and Marketing Alignment Imperative,” some 46 percent of sales and marketing executives felt that in order to maximize sales across the organization, the level of action on opportunities needed to be boosted, and the speed to action needed to be accelerated.

Despite this clear call to work smarter and faster, sales productivity improvements have been slow to materialize. According to CSO Insights, only 33 percent of a sales representative’s time is spent actively selling. Not only is sales struggling to push away the inefficiencies to build those critical relationships, but it can also be hard to actually get sales teams up and running. According to Accenture, 42.5 percent of sales reps take 10 months or longer to become productive enough to contribute to company goals.

So where and how can businesses empower the front line while sparking profitability through accelerated sales productivity? Are there new calls to action that sales leaders can respond to in an effort to streamline inefficient processes, eliminate waste and remove friction from sales engagement? How are smart organizations growing at scale while remaining compliant and error-free in their engagements with customers and prospects?

These are just some of the issues that the CMO Council, in partnership with Oracle, will explore in a one-hour, interactive webcast focused on productivity, profitability and opportunities to foster revenue. Joining the discussion will be experts and market leaders in sales and operational effectiveness to share where and how they are maximizing profitability while empowering sales teams and resources to work in a more nimble, agile and lucrative environment.

According to a study from the Content Marketing Institute, 65 percent of B2B marketers in the manufacturing industry believe that producing engaging content is their top challenge specific to maximizing the impact and efficacy of their content marketing initiatives. In this same study, B2B marketers revealed that, on average, they are leveraging some 13 different content marketing tactics across six social media channels and an average of three paid media resources.

This punctuates the increasingly complex web of engagement channels that, woven together, craft today’s customer experience. It also sheds light on a critical issue: the mass of content being produced might not be the most impactful or effective, thus missing the intended target and diminishing the return on content investment.

How are marketers confronting these issues of meshing content marketing and customer experience strategies across a growing digital landscape? In an age when customers expect the world to be available to them in perfect local context, how are marketers responding with highly relevant, contextual, impactful, content-rich experiences, regardless of channel or location? What silos need to be broken down in order to realize real ROI from both content and experiences? As the digital world enables rapid globalization, how have customer expectations for intense localization made content and engagement strategies even more rewarding?

According to IBM research, fully engaged customers spend three times more and are twice as likely to recommend your company. Yet time and time again, customers are being met with experiences that are not meeting their needs. Today’s buyers expect the right content to fall into place at just the right time, but only 21 percent say the marketing messages they receive are “usually relevant.” These heightened expectations—and the heightened reward from the new basic expectation of customer experience—present new questions for today’s marketing teams: Are you doing everything you can to provide a superior customer experience that is purpose-built to build loyalty and drive repeat business?

In this webinar, the CMO Council will be joined by Rosie Judd, the Georgia Aquarium’s Digital Media Manager, as she shares the underlying strategy for one of the biggest public aquariums in the world, in addition to the incremental steps taken that directly led to increased engagement. We will also be joined by Keith Meade, Senior Account Director for IBM, who will share real-world success stories that will inspire ideas for enhancing the buyer experience before and after key customer interactions.

Some of the topics covered in this interactive event will include:
• New approaches to capturing and leveraging data to better drive engagement
• Building a lifecycle marketing strategy that enhances every touchpoint and thinks beyond a campaign
• Getting back to the basics of relationship building, including setting up welcome and post-transaction experiences that turn buyers into relationships
• Measuring beyond opens and clicks, but making a splash with the business through loyal, engaged advocates

There is little doubt that marketers have made a commitment to customer experience—from developing roadmaps to an uncompromising customer journey to the development of data-rich personalized engagements. But what is next? Has customer experience become too buzzed about? Are we really re-thinking customer experience strategies, or are we just applying new buzzwords?

How we think about customer experience must evolve. Without this continuous evolution, transformation becomes impossible. To debate and discuss the big question of what’s next, the CMO Council has invited three marketers to join an interactive roundtable discussion that will focus on everything from transformation to the next conversation around experiences and expectations. Join us for this hour-long conversation, where live viewers will be able to ask questions and provide their own insights and thinking and where we will take on issues around media, lifecycle and insights.

Some of the early questions being asked of the panel will include:

•How has the landscape changed, and how are customers valuing and weighing new points of engagement?
•Where have we gone wrong with CRM and campaign management? Are we just automating reactions, or are we building relationships?
•What are the new points of insight and customer voice that need to be incorporated into our strategies? Has our quest for data moved us farther away from the real voice of the customer?

The 360-degree view of your customer has become something of a marketing unicorn—that thing you know is worth chasing for better customer engagement, retention and acquisition but feels impossible to find in today’s climate of slow corporate change and legacy infrastructures. In the past, we could afford to put off the hunt, saying that perfection was costly and that sales goals don’t wait for magical creatures. In today’s age of the customer, the opportunity to place corporate before customer or product before personalization is a thing of the past.

As the CMO Council continues the ongoing dialogue around customer engagement and the search for the single point of customer truth, we invite you to join us for a one-hour interactive webcast, where peers will gather to debate and discuss:

• Transitioning the conversation from if we can build a better 360-degree customer view, to how we start the journey and begin organizing the construct
• The role played by new technologies and channels, including a case study on how interactive personalized videos are shaping more impactful engagements

We will be joined by Forbes Insights writer and researcher, Lynda Brendish, along with Pitney Bowes Unicorn Catchers and Customer Engagement Leaders Liz Roche and Kristin Rahn, who will be sharing primary research and insights from the Forbes Insights report, “Engagement in the Age of the Customer.”

There is no single silver bullet to drive consistent customer engagement, but the strategies and technologies discussed in the webcast will set the stage for greater marketing success and will provide a glimpse of that magical unicorn. Thanks to our partners at Pitney Bowes, attendees will also receive a complimentary copy of the Forbes Insights report.

Adding context to an experience used to mean knowing “something” about the time or place a customer is in…be it in the moment or in the next best point of interaction. In the evolution of customer experience, context has been a key gating point, signaling the difference between knowing your customer is facing a blizzard versus a heat wave. But as the customer becomes more saavy about what experiences “should” exist, molding their expectations even more acutely and raising expectations, marketers must start to redefine what context is and differentiate a contextual experience from a clever campaign.

What are the implications of failing to deliver contextual experiences to today’s connected customer? Have the complexities of the enterprise, including our own strategies, solutions and systems, made the delivery of highly relevant, contextual experiences feel impossible? How are today’s business leaders redefining contextual in order to actually put the customer experience in context of the customer and the business?

Join the CMO Council, in partnership with SAP, as we kick off a discussion into the advancement of the contextual customer experience. Beyond campaigns and beyond CRM, this discussion will focus on the new meaning of context, in total context of the customer and the business. Adding their insights to this one-hour interactive webcast will be brand marketers working to advance their personalization and experience strategies along with experts in context, experience and looking far beyond CRM.

In today’s age of big data and analytics, marketers are looking to redefine how data and insights can be gathered to drive the business forward. Core to this is how organizations are getting smarter about opportunities to more strategically target the prospects that are most likely to yield profit and success. Marketers have embraced their role as the orchestrators of the customer experience, but there is still a real need to remain in the driver’s seat in steering bottom-line growth and enabling sales engagements.

Join the CMO Council as we explore the new secret sauce of the smartest CMOs—predictive intelligence. With the right predictive tools, all of this insight can be derived from data already collected across the organization and can be supercharged with third-party intelligence to pinpoint and predict just where organizational resources can be deployed for maximum effect.

According to the newly released study, “Predicting Routes to Revenue,” marketers intend to look directly at personalization as a key strategy to maximize customer value in 2016. In fact, according to the insights from more than 150 senior marketing decision makers, 58 percent will be adding more personalized experiences that are directly based on customer data. However, only 16 percent of marketers in the same study admitted they are delivering a customer-centric experience that fulfills brand promises and value at every step of the experience.

In fact:

-44 percent of marketers admit they do not have good visibility into customer lifetime value and retention rates
-36 percent feel that the current market environment is cluttered and confused, with a mass of online and offline communications adding to the noise and making it more challenging to engage with customers

So where will marketers need to invest, innovate and advance in order to reach their goal of delivering on the power of personalization? With an ever-growing list of marketing priorities, what personalization priorities exist? How do we ensure that the investments in talent and technology are moving the revenue needle? How do we finally put an end to “random acts of marketing” and, once and for all, create a connected, multi-channel experience that is in the context of the brand and the customer? What does the must-do punch list for prioritization look like for the entire customer-engaging organization?

Join the CMO Council as we gather a roundtable panel of guests to discuss the key marketing priorities that will make personalization a priority in the coming year. This will be an hour-long roundtable discussion of the needs, issues, challenges and big wins that marketers can achieve in the coming year. Joining the CMO Council on the panel will be experts from Pegasystems, who will be providing industry best practices and insights from leading brands.

When marketers advanced into 2015, headlines announced that it would be the year of customer analytics and intelligence—a year when CMOs would be shedding the fear of “analysis paralysis” and turning the threat of big data into big opportunities with customers. Yet in survey after survey and study after study, CMO Council members agreed that while the desire to achieve dynamic customer experiences was there, the reality of using data to create these experiences was a difficult task, especially when the customer was demanding personalization beyond the confines of marketing-only data.

So how are best-of-breed brands truly forging ahead with data? What are the new buzz-worthy opportunities that will make headlines (and possibly headaches) for marketers in 2016? Will the Internet of things truly be the opportunity that analysts are predicting, or will it be yet another far-off dream that only the richest brands can afford? Where will the customer expect brands to meet them next? And who is already on the path to meet these rising demands?

To kick off 2016 and begin to circulate some new ideas, the CMO Council is partnering with Teradata to host a one-hour webcast to discuss the big trends of 2015 and where the new year will take us. Among the key topics to be discussed:

• New expectations for data: From aggregating data from new sources to managing and cleansing the data we have, what are the new requirements for the data-driven business?
• The Internet of everything: Beyond smart cars and connected homes, the Internet of things will tell us more about our customers while demanding new intelligent engagements…are we ready?
• Anonymous no more: The difference between crossing the creepy line and thrilling a customer with relevance is a thin one that demands that marketers connect the dots between a single user’s known and unknown behavior online…but how?

Will 2016 be a year of disruption or innovation? For some businesses, disruption will come in the form of new businesses and new business models challenging the very behavior of how, when and where customers engage with brands. Digital transformation is increasingly influenced by new digital business models, which have played an increasingly visible role in the digital marketplace, with subscription brands like (like Netflix, Apple Music, Birchbox and the Dollar Shave Club) and pay-to-access business models (including Airbnb and Zipcar). The Internet of things (IoT) promises to open the disruptive floodgates, with unsuspecting industries seeing the model take hold in unlikely places.

Consider new business models within healthcare, where providers no longer need to heavily invest in equipment, instead paying incremental fees for as-used services of X-ray equipment and advanced monitoring systems. What was once a traditional business model of equipment as the end product has now given way to multiple business models powered by connected devices.

The new normal is that customers across both B2B and B2C industries can now choose to buy in the exact way that suits their convenience. These new pricing innovations can forever disrupt an industry—or forever ruin the customer experience if executed poorly.

Can we envision a world in which our products are free but our revenue is derived from incremental service sales? Can we see a revenue stream waiting in a recurring revenue model that leverages sensors and the IoT to optimize services, from directions to automotive services?

Join the CMO Council and our partners at Aria Systems as we gather experts in driving this disruption to discuss new ideas, new opportunities and the role marketing must play in ensuring that the customer experience is managed and optimized, from the point of engagement through loyalty

According to a recent CMO Council study, the ability to achieve a truly personalized, enriched and highly relevant digital experience has been challenged by data availability and aggregation—and more specifically, getting to the right intelligence that can be learned from this wealth of data. “Brand Attraction From Enriched Interaction,” a report completed in partnership with IBM, reveals that only 21 percent of corporate marketers believe they are doing a very good job of captivating and engaging their audiences while only 19 percent feel they are doing a good job of creating campaigns that reach and resonate with their diverse and complex customer bases.

But just as customers keep evolving their own expectations for experience, service and engagement from the brands they choose to do business with, global trends and technology evolutions also threaten to drive the ability to exceed customer expectations further and further out of marketing’s reach. This digital disruption that is being powered by the customer requires each marketer to look forward to spot key trends that are on the horizon so that organizations can start laying a solid foundation to enable the rapid advancement of the digital agenda.

Join the CMO Council, in partnership with IBM Digital Experience, as we explore the opportunities, requirements, challenges and strategies needed to stay ahead of the curve and take optimal advantage of the key experience trends and transformations shaking up marketing in the coming year. Among the issues to be discussed in the interactive hour-long webcast:

•Marketing’s reaction to how key tech trends will impact operations and business
•Insights into where, how and why these technology trends will change how our customers choose to engage—and who customers will turn to for new experiences
•Best practices in leveraging and integrating these technology trends, from APIs to capitalizing on the Internet of things

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council is dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership and personal relationship building among senior corporate marketing leaders and brand decision-makers across a wide range of global industries. The CMO Council's 7,500 plus members control more than $400 billion in aggregated annual marketing expenditures and run complex, distributed marketing and sales operations worldwide. In total, the CMO Council and its strategic interest communities include over 12,000 global executives across 100 countries in multiple industries, segments and markets. Regional chapters and advisory boards are active in the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. The Council's strategic interest groups include the Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness (CLOSE), Marketing Supply Chain Institute, Customer Experience Board, Loyalty Leaders, Online Marketing Performance Institute, and the Forum to Advance the Mobile Experience.